O'Donovan on punishment

Oliver O'Donovan does talk good sense about a lot of things, not least on the matter of punishment. He takes from Grotius the cue that punishment is 'ontologically native to God'. He repudiates some of the contemporary theology that denies this (namely that of Gorringe) in the name of dening that punishment of any kind is valid, but fails to do so coherently, or theologically.

He writes:

When we speak of God's own 'punishing' we are speaking of his judgement within the quasi-political context of his own covenant-faithfulness. Divine punishment...is God's disclosure of himself as our good, revealing the truth of our wrong. For this reason Christians have always found it necessary to speak of divine punishment in connection with the Atonement, for the Atonement is the supreme demonstration of God's covenant-faithfulness. Ways of Judgment, p. 107

Charles Taylor on Salman Rushdie

For purposes of my thesis I was delighted to discover a comment by Charles Taylor on the Rushdie controversy of the late 80s. What Taylor rightly observes is that The Satanic Verses 'is a profoundly Western book', whatever its exotic subject matter.

In Rushdie's book, one has the comfortable sense that exactly the things which repel him from religion...are the things its devotees cherish. They experience exactly the same spiritual realities, and just reverse the sign. Rushdie's book is comforting to the western liberal mind, which shares one feature with that of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the belief that there is nothing outside their world-view which needs deeper understanding, just a perverse refection of the obviously right. To live in this difficult world, the western liberal mind will have to learn to reach out more.

Quite. But, can it? The western liberal mind always already has ordered views other than its own, either by means of a progressivist narration ('oh, they are so primitive, we got over that years ago') or by demonising it as 'intolerant'. So, why will the western liberal even see the need to reach out? Isn't it rather a matter of teaching the world to behave in the right way?

MacIntyre and the failure of Culture

Every culture is characterised in part by what it conceals and obscures from view, by what its habits of mind prevent it from ackonwledging and appropriating. We err therefore in so largely, sometimes exclusively writing the history of ideas, of science, of art, of culture in general in terms of positive achievement. Culture is present also in failure and it can in crucial respects blind the educated to what needs to be seen. So it was with the failure to understand the work of Aquinas in the late Middle Ages. So perhaps it may be with us... . p. 169

This is a rather a gloomy - characteristically grumpy we might say - assessment of the state of intellectual enquiry! MacIntyre characterises the reception of Aquinas' grand synthesis of Aristotle and Augustine as a rank failure, with the usual suspects - Occam and Scotus - taking a beating on this. And in Meister Eckhart's sermons, the business of theological thinking becomes (for MacIntyre) separated from rational thinking: preaching becomes a matter of rhetorical effect, a 'mere rationalization of the preacher's processes'. This effect MacIntyre sees very much in evidence today.

Aussie theoblogians hard at work

Jason has started a great series on Names and the Name: catch the first two posts here and here.

Byron has just completed his momentous series entitled "Would Jesus vote Green?" and you can find the whole series linked to one post now.

Ben starts a new series on encounters with tradition today.

Rory has got some stuff to say about Atheism and Christopher Hitchens.

Marty has completed five terrific 'Postcards from Karl'

Moffatt's great ten-part series on the Spirit has finally come to a close, as well.

David Hohne is asking how to become 'A more apolegetic person', echoing sentiments found here on this blog.

And a visit to Michael Bird's site is never a waste of time, that's for sure.

Where the project is at the moment - any thoughts?

"Our intention in this thesis has been to give a theological (rather than, say, historical or sociological) account of Christian martyrdom and of at least some of the implications of that account. In particular the question of identity was raised as a matter on which an explication of martyrdom could potentially shed considerable light. The basic theological datum with which we began was the martyrdom in the form of witness (‘white’ martyrdom) was inseperable from the identity of the Christian, with bloody (or ‘red’) martyrdom as its ‘external representation’. Bloody matyrdom then is a sign of what the inner reality of the Christian life is like.

We hastened to recognise at this stage that discussions of martyrdom occur under pressure of a severe critique: it is certainly no longer a given that martyrdom is esteemed as a form of death just in and of itself. Rather, martyrs are accused of denying life and of perverting love, of resiling from their duty to do good, of neglecting the bonds of family and friendship, of extreme egotism of a destructive kind. The spectre of religious violence hangs always and already over any discussion of martyrdom in the modern setting. Martyrs are more likely to inspire fear than reverence. However, is it the case that Christian martyrdom really falls under this critique? Chapter one, then, examined two powerful and very different attempts to describe authentic selfhood in the contemporary world and asked whether either of them could be reconciled with an identity informed by the idea of Christian martyrdom. Of Charles Taylor it could be said that he was bending over backwards to make room for the possibility of Christian martyrdom, or something like it, in his account of authenticity; but is not firm enough about the potential for inauthenticity. Martyrs are not those who accept that their understanding of reality is just one amongst many, after all. Salman Rushdie, for his part, presents a far more irascible figure. He is vehemently opposed to martyrdom as a model for human self-identity: it is far too emedded in traditional ways of seeing the world that do not adequately understand the shifting and liquid conditions of the present order. It is insufficiently open to new experiences and corrupting of the love between individuals. It perpetuates the cycle of violence by preaching resentment and hatred, by viewing the subject as identifiable through his or her victimhood. It allows human beings excuses for not feeling and for not living as they might. It is the result of fideistic religion that cordons itself off from reason. However, Rushdie’s account is not without its own difficulties: it is hard to see that he has successfully escaped from the ‘self-determination’ problem that Taylor derides in his account. Furthermore, while his depiction of martyrdom may be valid for some Christian and other religious martyrdoms, it is certainly not the case that his criticisms of martyrdom in this guise fairly describe a Christian martyrdom that is true to its own sources – in the example of Christ himself, in the canonical Scriptures and in the ripening tradition.

In fact, what Rushdie seeks in a self-identity is in some ways quite similar to that which is described by Christian martyrdom. Rushdie seeks to free the individual from the matrices of the past: culture, religion, race, gender and so on. He applauds the embrace of ‘the new’, delights in unforeseen possibilities and the potential for boundary-crossing connections between human beings in the name of peace. However, the characters that Rushdie introduces are still masters of their own destinies and makers of their own images. They are paragons of freedom, above all.
Into this context we offered our reading of Christian martyrdom as generated by Eliot in his perceptive play. The meaning of the martyrdom is informed, as we watch the visitation of the Tempters to Thomas, by that which the martyr renounces. Many of things renounced are very good and worthy ways to be: they are all the more powerful as temptations for being so. These are promising potential selves, full of opportunity to be useful to society and fulfilled and powerful as an individual.

The First Tempter offers Thomas the chance to guard himself against the twists and turns of fate by persuing a life of ease and security; or at least, he offers him the yearning for the time when he had this life. Tranposing this temptation into the terms offered by Martha C. Nussbaum in her analysis of Greek tragedy, we saw how the management of luck and the securing of safety was (and remains) a crucial component of successful existence in a world fraught with chance. However, the martyr walks away from this potential for security. Discipleship of Christ is described as not a matter for looking back to home, or even looking around in the present for cover against whatever may come, but rather for looking ahead to the eternal city promised in the gospel of Jesus (as we discovered with Augustine’s help). The martyr steps out into risk knowing that there is no turning back and that the cost may be great. However, he or she is not merely a thrill-seeker, riding a wave of risk all the way to the shoreline; on the contrary, the risk is taken in the context of hope secured in the ascended Lord Christ. This risk-taking by the disciple also exposes the temporary nature of human fortifications against luck.

The Second Tempter, in a tactic pursued also by the Fourth, tries to catch Thomas in a double-bind. On the one hand he offers to him the chance to make peace with his (God-appointed) ruler so that the two may collaborate in performing the business of government: meteing out justice for the good of the people. The price? ‘A certain submission’ to the king. When Thomas draws back from this, appealing to the ‘power of the keys’, the Tempter accuses him of power hunger. We saw next in our discussion of John Rawls that this temptation is not unique to conditions of monarchy and papacy: in fact, even under contemporary forms of liberal order a version of this temptation will be on offer. Churches may be tempted to secede their distinctive speech in favour of being able to participate in the public square; or may be accused of sectarianism if they refrain. The response from Scripture and the tradition (this time chiefly Augustine, Tyndale and O’Donovan) was to advance the insight, revealed in the martyr’s renunciation, that power and authority have a singles source though a dual expression. This helps both to relativise the power of the imperium and to show it as circumscribed by divine authority at every point; and also to encourage the Church that in the gospel it has its own authority – though it is of a distinctively non-coercive and persuasive nature.

The Third Tempter on the other hand, also interested in power, offers to Thomas the option of rebellion against the king. There is a case to be made here: tyranny is worth fighting against after all. There may be more authentic and more just forms of government available. Surely the martyr, having renounced collaboration with the ruler must persue subversive and destabilising activity to be consistent. Again the case is made that this is the way in which more just outcomes for the English people can be persued. What is more, this is a path of action, of putting noble thoughts into concrete practice. Once more we see how this may be consonant with a powerful and comprehensive account of the good life in action, as we find it this time in (a Nussbaumian reading of) Aristotle. Yet again, the martyr must also refuse. The form that his resistance to power takes is loyal; he does not hold national identity as an absolute value by any means; and he refuses to assert himself by seizing at action that will achieve that end. In fact (as we saw with the assistance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer), he rather acts ‘passively’: which is to say, in a way that takes responsibility for others, that is prepared to suffer what may come.

In the Fourth Tempter we have the most surprising of the temptations and another one that takes a two-fold course: martyrdom itself is offered, first, with Thomas imagining how he will be remembered and honoured by posterity, and secondly with imagining the crown of heaven being placed on his deserving temple. The renunciations of the first three temptations runs headlong into this fourth: if Thomas imagines himself accruing heavenly merit and forcing the divine hand on account of his repudiation of the secured self, the powerful self and the active self, he is sorely mistaken. He must also set aside the martyred self. We find these temptations maintained first in the representation of the ancient ‘honour ethic’, with all its military trappings; and secondly, in the theology of heavenly rewards which is widespread in religious accounts of martyrdom including some Christian ones, admittedly. Both of these descriptions of martyrdom were proven to be problematically self-justifying. The insight given in the renunciation of this temptation is that, as Thomas is able to declare to his congregation in the Cathedral on St Stephen’s Day, martyrdom is itself an act of God. The making of martyrs is given to divine providence and not to human hands. As we saw, it was Augustine in particular who had to wrestle with this in the context of great enthusiasm for martyrdom in the church of his day. The Christian offers himself or herself in free obedience as a witness to the divine rule; the outcome is not for him or her to determine.

In chapter six our focus was drawn to the twin poles of temptation and providence. These themes had been constantly with us as we examined the four temptations – the move is the narrative is away from temptation and, not towards a construction of a new identity or self, but towards a vision of the providence of God: namely, faith. We asked ‘who killed the Archbishop?’, which is to do just as the play itself invites us. Using Riceour’s insights, we determined that peirasmoj – a concept inclusive of trail and temptation – is part of the ‘narrative logic’ of martyrdom. Peirasmos, we determined, was an inescapable condition for human beings; but it is not clear from within the human sphere by what strength a human being may overcome it. It is an inescapable and undefeatable given. There is no self, no identity that a person may put forward or construct in order to overcome and endure peirasmoj with any hope for success. What is more, peirasmos is so severe as to threaten the individual with her own disintegration as a person. By investigating the narrative logic of martyrdom, once again with the aid of the narrative structure provided for us by Eliot in his play, we determined that it is the Christian faith in the providence of God, consummated in the life, death and resurrection of Christ, which is the foundation for resistance and renunciation of peirasmos. Christ himself undergoes peirasmos as a trial and as a temptation, and is revealed as overcoming both.

In this last chapter we have attempted to bring our study to its consummation by returning – conveniently by means of critical discussion of Murder in the Cathedral in performance – to the question of whether martyrdom represents in fact the utter breakdown in communication between two competing views of the world. What we suggested by our discussion was that Christian martyrdom, as a testimony to truth, does not repell but rather invites. The dramatic form that martyrdom takes draws the observer into the narrative thought-world which is shaped by peirasmoj from the human side and providence from the divine side, and ultimately finds these two aspects conjoined in the (hi)story of Jesus Christ."

Phillip Jensen on Eulogies

An interesting take on the shifting shape of funeral services here. What a culture says and does at death is always evidence of what that culture understands meaning, identity and purpose to be. Diarmaid McCulloch often cites wills, for example, as evidence for the change from old Catholic to new Protestant beliefs during the Reformation period...

The survival of the Cathedrals

Salisbury Cathedral

Diarmaid MacCulloch reckons the synthesis of Reformed theology and Cathedrals makes for the distinctive, if paradoxical, nature of Anglicanism:

..there was nothing like the English cathedral close, with its round of regular liturgy involving a large staff of clergy and elaborat music sung by paid professionals, nothing of which seemed at the time to have much relevance to a Protestant Church. The English survival is a puzzle: a cynical view is that cathedral estates and offices could act as a reservoir of patronage for the powerful... But perhaps more important was the stubborn love of church choral music shown by that midwife of the Church of Englan, Elizabeth I. ...Strangely this exquisite sacred music...had virtually no effect on musical and devotional life in English parish churches from Elizabeth's reign to the time of the 'Oxford Movement'... the parishes sane metrical psalms in the manner of Geneva, at least until the major evangelical 'revival' in the eighteenth century popularised a new sort of hymn... Nevertheless the survival of the cathedral tradition had huge significance for the future of Anglicanism. It struggled through whatmight have seem unpromising Elizabethen years to reveal the potential for liturgical spleandour in Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer (a development which, almost certainly, he would not have welcomed). Reformation, p. 511

This tension between parish worship and Cathedral worship is something that is still in evidence: not always a happy synthesis you would have to say.

Ricoeur on Narrative Theology

Harris Manchester College, Oxford.

At the end of his article 'Biblical Time' Ricoeur, asserting that the strands of the OT combine to produce a very complex notion of 'time', critiques the proposal for a kind of narrative theology:

...the project of a merely narrative theology is a chimera. What it fundamentally fails to understand is first the primitive overlapping of narrative and law in the Torah, then the dialectic between the whole of tradition as prescriptive as well as narrative with prophecy and its eschatological indication. Next, a simple narrative theology misses the deepening of the transitory character of historical accomplishments through the immemorial time of wisdom, and, finally, and most important of all, the powerful recapitulation of all these figures of time in the 'today' of the hymn.'

See, the bible is not just a narrative: it's a musical. At one and the same time, you have a particular history, and a universal history of the world; you have action and commentary on that action; you have the past sung into the present, and the future promised. He's spot on, but I can't help feeling that Reformers knew this already. Certainly, my old teacher Graeme Goldsworthy has been saying this for years. Still it is nice to have someone with Ricoeur's street cred saying the same thing.

Ricoeur on Biblical Time

Ricoeur points out that the dichotomy between so-called Greek time (as circular) and Hebraic time (as linear) is facile and won't hold. He then goes on to describe 'biblical time' in terms of the intersection of the different literary genres within the scriptures and their perceptions of time.

So:

The instruction issuing from the successive legislations, unified under the emblem of Sinai and Moses, colors the narratives themselves. These narratives, under the pressure of the prescriptive, become narratives of the march of a people with God under the sign of obedience and disobedience.

He calls this the 'narrativisation of ethics and the ethicisation of narratives'. What has this to do with time, especially? Well:

...the law qualifies not just the event of its giving but all the narratives in which this giving is encased, in such a way that the founding events become events that do not pass away but remain.

More words, for preachers

Oxford, at dusk: the Broad

1. Preaching is an honouring of the capacity of words to do their job: to offer praise to God

2. The task of the preacher is to take us to see the world with the eyes of faith…using only words. But words are capable of doing this.

3. The sermon is not a verbal technique, as if it is merely some aesthetic object. But, it can be beautiful, and moving. And artful.

4. Words, even in sermons - perhaps especially in sermons - can do tremendous damage. Handle with care.

5. Preaching begins with listening: it is attentive to the word (and the words) of God. This in a way is the only necessary skill, the only prerequisite for method.

6. Preaching is about transforming language because it is about transforming thought. Preaching teaches the church how to talk about the world, the real world as it is really is (as to how it appears). Preaching gives us the conceptual tools with which to see what we can’t by our nature see.

Andrew Cameron on the good life

H/T to Rory for this one:

"…Christian Ethics is best understood as a response to the way God's kindness bubbles over into every area of life. As such it is simply an extension of the gospel. Christians may therefore talk about life, and then even live it, in such a mesmerizingly beautiful way that those who see and hear cannot help but want to know more of Christ. It is in this sense that Christians are in the business of saying “Yes” to the world."Andrew Cameron, "How to Say YES to the World—Evangelical Social Ethics", RTR, 66:1 (April 2007), 24.


This kind of fits well with the whole David Bentley Hart thesis too...

Play resumes...

A thumping victory by the Merton-Mansfield (& Wycliffe!) team over Corpus Christi.

Words, for preachers

That's my brother, Lt David Jensen, 2RAR, setting the East Timorese straight. He's not a gorilla by the way.

With speech, humanity is a bit like a gorilla with a loaded pistol: the explosive weapon is in the hands of someone who has an uncertain control of it. While on the one hand we know that our words have immense power to harm or to do good, we are not always masters of what we say. The connection between words and things has become slippery: not because of some philosophical problem but because those who wield them are deceitful and prone, not just to experience human limitations, but to mistakes.

However, God chooses to use human words in his salvation of the world: not overcoming their creaturely limits, but sanctifying them for his purposes. The paradigm is the calling of the prophet Isaiah (in Isaiah 6): terrified by his vision of God’s glory and holiness, he is rightly a reluctant prophet. As he says: ‘I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips’. But an angel brings a burning coal to touch his mouth. God in calling him purifies his speech so that he can use it to address his people.

It ought not to be surprising then, that with the pouring out of the Holy Spirit after the ascension of Jesus, God enables people to talk about him with their limited human words. In fact, more than just talk about him: it ought not be a surprise that God uses the words of human beings to bring about his mighty purposes – to advance the redemption of the world and to give life to the dead. Pentecost is a miracle of redeemed human speech, a reversal of the divisions of Babel. The gospel of Jesus is a word of new creation with its own new grammar: it is a whole new language to learn.

A picture of Sydney every day

This is a lovely site for the homesick!

Must reads?

So, help me out here: what are the must-read theological books that are coming out soon or have recently appeared?

I take many of my recommendations from Ben (or from people on his site) I must admit. I am looking to pick up Paul DeHart's The Trial of the Witnesses though it seem to be dealing with a meta meta discourse. Peer group pressure is a wonderful thing!

I still have much of The Beauty of the Infinite to deal with, too. Hmm.

The spectacle of Martyrdom

Martyrologists who exaggerate the details of the suffering and torture of the martyrs in order to increase the rhetorical impact of their work are in fact doing the martyr a great disservice. The risk here is that the martyr is painted as merely a victim, and the rhetorical impact of telling the story is then limited to pathos for the suffering of the victim. The content of their witness then disintegrates...

The gospels show the way here: as we read of the death of Jesus, we may feel pity for the disciples, and sorrow for the role our fellow human beings played in his execution, and even disgust and outrage at the injustice perpetuated: but the evangelists do not draw us to pity Jesus. They do not dwell on the gruesome details of his torture and suffering (pace Mel Gibson); they do not portray him as powerless or voiceless; they do not depict the sadistic pleasure of his executioners. Jesus is no victim; events do not get out of hand for him at all – he is seen as always ahead of them. His innocence is not established merely so we can feel appalled at the miscarriage of justice, but so that we can understand the significance of his sacrifice in a theological matrix.

There were (and are) worse, more painful deaths; there certainly were (and are) more pitiable victims of injustice. Jesus is not, like some protagonist in a Greek tragedy, the victim of a twist in fate or the misalignment of the planets. An account that emphasizes the pathos of Jesus’ death quite misses the point – which is that the cross of Christ is the expression par excellence of the divine rule over all. It is the moment of the enthronement of Israel’s messiah in Zion and over the whole world. Likewise, a martyrology that dwells too luridly on the blood that flows is not a martyrology but a victimology. A death cast in these terms in the end witnesses only to itself as a death. The best of the early martyr-acts, for all their faults, do not lapse in this direction: Polycarp, for example, though of great age, dies in such a way that his captors look more pitiable than he. Events are not in their control (nor Polycarp's); but Polycarp's faith and asssurance makes it a triumph. Who could feel sorry for him?

Martyrdom as communicative act III

I am trying hard here to express a question that is bugging me a little... Martyrdom is an act of witness - which implies that it is an act which communicates a particular meaning or significance. Now, of course, if anyone recognises the divine agency at work in and the divine authority revealed by the act of martyrdom, it is because the Holy Spirit gives it to them to so recognise it. It is not the act in and of itself that communicates this: it is the Spirit testifying through it. Like the parables of Jesus, spiritual insight, given from above, is required to really understand in full.

Now, not recognising this is a mistake Christians often make. We see this when they point to- and even focus on - the extreme suffering of the martyr, or to the pathos of their words, or to the miraculous signs that attend the martyrdom (these have been features of martyrology since the beginning). It was fascinating that, when the recent Turkish martyrdoms were first reported, the writer felt compelled to exaggerate the extent of the torture of the victims - something that a later (very wise) letter sought to correct. (This was of course the mistake made by Gibson in The Passion of the Christ - imaginging that he needed to focus on the torture as a device to move the audience with sympathy for Christ, as if that was the means by which the gospel would be best communicated. Wrong, wrong, wrong.)

BUT: it is not aside from or arbitrarily next to the drama of a martyrdom that the Spirit testifies. It is in the very structures of this particular action that he works. Which is to say: just because spiritual insight is needed to fully understand does NOT mean that what we have before us is otherwise unintelligible. Again, taking the parables as an analogy: the parables are not runes that need to be decoded only by the select few to whom has been given the secret key. Far from it: the meaning of the parables is available for public scrutiny. A martyrdom occurs in front of us and, we may say, it has terms on which it makes sense - though we may not accept those terms of course.

In sum: while affirming the sheer givenness and transcendence of the knowledge of God, I also want to affirm that revelation does not occur arbitrarily or outside of the ordinary world of speaking and acting, but rather through it and in it.

Thomas Aquinas on fortitude and martyrdom

Aquinas considers the issue of courage/fortitude and martyrdom: is it an act of fortitude? Certainly, the early martyrologies apply soldier-like qualities to the martyrs.

...it belongs to fortitude to strengthen man in the good of virtue, especially against dangers, and chiefly against dangers of death, and most of all against those that occur in battle. Now it is evident that in martyrdom man is firmly strengthened in the good of virtue, since he cleaves to faith and justice notwithstanding the threatening danger of death, the imminence of which is moreover due to a kind of particular contest with his persecutors...
Two things must be considered in the act of fortitude. One is the good wherein the brave man is strengthened, and this is the end of fortitude; the other is the firmness itself, whereby a man does not yield to the contraries that hinder him from achieving that good, and in this consists the essence of fortitude. Now just as civic fortitude strengthens a man's mind in human justice, for the safeguarding of which he braves the danger of death, so gratuitous fortitude strengthens man's soul in the good of Divine justice, which is "through faith in Christ Jesus," according to Rm. 3:22. Thus martyrdom is related to faith as the end in which one is strengthened, but to fortitude as the eliciting habit.

Now, I am by instinct repelled by this, because the emphasis on 'courage' is misplaced I think. It places all the weight on the analogy between martyrdom and secular acts, and on the virtues displayed by the martyr. So, the witness of the martyr ends up being to his or her own fortitude rather than on to Christ himself. What might rescue this account for me is that Aquinas acknowledges this fortitude as a gracious gift coming from without and strengthening the person, rather than a matter of significant and impressive inner resolve. It is so abstract, though, isn't it? 'the good of Divine justice' is what we are strengthened in rather than in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ... though technically they are the same thing I guess.

Vaughan Roberts on Daniel 7

Harlech Castle, Wales.

Vaughan Roberts (of St Ebbe's C of E the rector) preached a terrific sermon on Daniel 7 today - one that rang all sorts of bells in my thesis addled brian. He started with the martyr question: if I was in the situation of having to chose life or martyrdom, what would I do? The right answer is, of course, 'I don't know'... Why? Because martyrdom is not within our human power; and because it isn't about exercising courage.

And this was the earth-shattering point: it is about vision, aka faith. That is, the vision we get in Dan 7 - the vision of the temporary state of the empires and the sitting on the throne of the ancient of days, and the handing of authority to the Son of Man - is visible to the eyes of faith. And it is this vision - a revelation that is given, of course - of the way things truly are that makes it possible for the Christian to say 'I can be none other than what I am'. This is a vision of the providential work of God worked out in Jesus, the Son of Man.

So, what makes a martyr distinctively Christian is this vision of the rule and authority of God in Christ Jesus. Without that vision: nothing. Martyrdom (contra Aquinas) is the result of faith.

Stourhead in May

Thanks to the Exiled Preacher for recommending that we visit Stourhead in Wiltshire...

BB Warfield said one day:

'The Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the church'.

Quite. This is what happens with thinkers with a legacy so enormous: it fissures, such that widely differing schools can both validly claim them as forebears.

Luther on the Eucharist

Sometimes it is nice to have a bit of Luther polemik in the morning, just to get your heart started:

Furthermore we note how seldom the Evangelists and Apostles make mention of the Eucharist, a fact that has led many to wish they had said more about it. On the other hand they ceaselessly emphasize, even to the point of weariness, the ministry of the Word. It is as if the Spirit had foreseen these coming abuses and errors of the shorn ones which would turn the heart from the Word of power and truth to that futile change of bread and wine, all through life clinging to these outward appearances while rejecting the marvelous light into which we have been called.

Martin Luther, Concerning the Ministry.

ahh...

Better 'n' coffee.

[H/T to Gordon Cheng for this one. Though of course, Luther was not an anti-sacramentarian - far from it...and neither am I.]

The blood of the martyrs...

Jason - the other 36 year old Anglican priest studying for an Oxbridge doctorate - reflects on the martyrs of Turkey in a post entitled: The blood of the martyrs...

Martyrdom as communicative act II

Cranmer at the stake, 1556. Note: he holds out his right hand to the flames - the one that signed his recantations.

What is it about martyrdom that communicates (if it does)? This question asks at a deeper level: what is it in martyrdom, coming as it does out of a precisely Christian understanding of the world, that is able to be meaningful enough in the terms of a world view that is at least at face value utterly hostile to it? The word of the cross is a skandalon – and so are its re-enactments. In the first instance this question must be answered by saying immediately and of course that it is nothing but only the Spirit of God himself that illuminates this enactment of the gospel of Jesus Christ as a testimony to the truth. This ought not be conceived narrowly: the effects of a Christian martyrdom include not only the conviction of the individual but also the transformation of the political and social order.



But it is also possible to speak on the human side of the question: the witness of the martyr occurs within the human sphere of speaking and listening, acting and observing. This question is addressed by Kevin Vanhoozer in his recent work entitled The Drama of Doctrine. Fittingly, he uses in the book the motifs of the theatre and performance with which to describe Christian speech and action as it is generated and responds to divine speech-acts. For Vanhoozer, martyrdom as an imitation of the cross of Christ is an embodiment by the church of the gospel it preachers. As such, nothing is more alienating to the world: by acting in this way the church ‘throws into question Everyman’s everyday assumptions about the meaning of life and the human good’. This has almost exactly been our contention throughout this thesis. But it is not only given a critical function: martyrdom is a dramatic performance of the doctrine of the atonement; it is the ‘quintessential form of prophetic action’. As Brad S. Gregory writes (of the Reformation period):



More dramatically than sermons, catechisms, or common worship, martyrdom trumpeted what was at stake in disputes over the content and practice of true Christianity.

As a drama, then – a narrative performed, or enacted – martyrdom invites the outsider to consider the truth to which the martyr testifies. In martyrdom, speech and action are spectacularly united

Rowan Williams on 'Being disciples'

Rowan Williams' talk given at the Fulcrum conference on 'Being Disciples" is here .

His particular theme is that being a disciple is not an intermittent business: it is rather a call to consistent and expectant listening to the master. But I also liked this closing paragraph:

...discipleship is indeed about traveling, and about growing. You can't begin to describe the life of the disciples in the New Testament without coming to grips with that dimension of traveling. Disciples were people called away from home because they must be where their master is. And that is never going to be comfortable; but perhaps it becomes intelligible when one realizes (something that again is writ large on every page of scripture) that the home where you will finally realize who and what you are is the home, the place prepared for you, by Jesus. And the disciple is engaged in a journey from a place that looks like a comfortable and manageable home towards a home that is eternal and that - as St Augustine says - doesn't fall away or fall into non-existence because we don't happen to be living in it at the moment. Discipleship is, paradoxically, a journey away from home, and a journey toward home. Just as the conversion that is the daily task of a disciple, is a break with what seems closest and dearest to us, and a cleaving to what is actually deepest and most natural in us.

Christian drama vs Greek drama

I would wish to argue that Murder in the Cathedral is powerful as a drama, certainly, at that immediate and surface level of the audience’s first encounter with it; but that this unusual and striking power is dependent on the Christian component of the play in a way in which the Greek tragedy is not in the same way dependent upon its religious world-view. (Or, it could be that the Greek experience of living in a world governed by a hidden fortuna is very similar to living in the contemporary secular world. The feeling of having to manage luck, as we have seen in our discussion of Nussbaum’s reading of Greek tragedy, is only to near to the post-Christian person. )

This is because the Christian gospel is itself of the form of a dramatic action. Christianity is not at all disconnected from the action of the play, inhabiting only the fringes of the script in abstruse religious forms; rather it everywhere and necessarily gives its actual form to the action of the play. The death of Thomas is so obviously and so insistently an imitation of the death of Christ; the form of the action of the play resembles in outline the temptation, passion and death of Jesus, without which it cannot bear its full meaning.

We could go further in taking up Emrys Jones’s point about the historical aspect of the play: the connection with historical events through imaginative and symbolic reconstruction is quite distinctively a Christian development. Granted, Greek drama and literature on occasion took its subjects from history, or from pre-history: but it turned them into types and showed no real interest in the correspondence of the action to the action in history. In the Christian imagination, historical events are traceable in direct line back from the present: and though clearly ‘fictional’ elements are added to the reconstruction of the event in order to make the dramatisation appealing within the conventions of literary forms, we see reminders to the audience everywhere that there are real historical events to which the action is intended to correspond, and of which the audience is meant to have a vicarious experience. Could it ever be said of a Greek drama, as Jones says of Murder in the Cathedral, that it ‘takes its strength from its fidelity to history’? As we have seen, and as Eliot demonstrates in his play, a Christian view of the world rests on an understanding of providentia dei, not fortuna; and so history necessarily takes on a different significance as a meaningfully continuous series of events.

Charles Taylor in Public Culture 18.2

Charles Taylor, insightful as ever, but not really understanding any but the most extreme of protestant hermeneutics I feel:

There is not one thing, called “religion,” which previously receded and is now coming back, like some raging tsunami. What we call secularization is a process that deeply destabilized and marginalized earlier forms of religion; but, partly as a consequence of this, new forms have arisen. The forms that are now “returning” in strength are thoroughly modern, and we cannot understand either them or modernity if we ignore this.

Ironically, the most obvious site of novelty lies in what are called, in the rough and rather confused language of media commentary, “fundamentalisms.” These are usually so called because they see themselves as harking back to earlier, purer forms of religion, beyond the recent compromises of modernism. So Protestant fundamentalism sees itself as returning to the purity of the Reformation sola scriptura (by scripture alone), which in turn saw itself as a return to primitive Christianity. Influential Islamicist Sayyid Qutb proposes to return to the principles alive in the first polity established by the Prophet and his companions. The irony and pathos here lie in the fact that precisely these attempts to return to purer forms are the sites of the most startling innovations; what is more, they feed on those innovations that are usually seen as quintessentially modern.

Thus the notion of literal Biblical inerrancy, with its clear distinction from and hostility to the figurative, is plainly part of the culture that has developed around modern positivistic science. Evolutionary theory has to be opposed by “creation science.” Augustine, one of the great reference figures for Western Protestantism, would be bewildered by this discourse, recognizing as he did many levels of meaning in the Biblical text. Protestant fundamentalists deviate from age-old Christian orthodoxy precisely in their wholesale acceptance of this modern positivist literalism, all the while loudly proclaiming their fidelity to the original pure form of Christianity.

What notion of 'literal Bibilical inerrancy', we may well ask, is this of which he speaks? But still, it is interesting to note the sheer modernity/postmodernity of fundamentalisms...

Brad S Gregory - Salvation at Stake

Quite the most brilliant account of martyrdom in the Reformation is Salvation at Stake by Brad S. Gregory. Two things he has said have caught my eye:

Firstly, this about the relation of the will to the martyr's 'act':

The voluntary nature of martyrdom was profoundly paradoxical: the martyr’s agency depended up relinquishing control, their strength upon a naked admission of their utter impotence and total dependence on God. p.132

This is an essential description of the role of the will in the Christian life, in fact. It is, yes, an exercise of will, but in the form of a submissive and obedient - a properly faithful - will.

Secondly, this, on the inability of the contemporary world to file martydom in a convenient part of its draws:

…the martyr’s own words and actions show that whatever utility the postmodern, New Historicist notion of Renaissance self-fashioning might have, it is inapplicable to them. Prison experience entailed not calculating agency and self-interest, but passivity in a double sense – both suffering and “being done unto”. Behind stone walls there were no courtly patrons from whom to curry favor, no theatrical poses to strike; the Lord saw behind every mask, including dissimulation of his truth. The only sensible course of action lay not in “constructing” a self, but in stripping away every pretense to acknowledge the self one was: a weak, enfleshed soul, created by and radically dependent on God. p.133

Properly understood on its own terms, then, the martyr's intentions cannot somehow be reduced by Foucauldian cynicism to 'self-fashioning', or the construction of a suitable posture for the self. In fact, rather, we see here an unselfing...

Parables

John Dominic Crossan Rowan Williams' and Paul Ricoeur's emphasis on the parable has got me to thinking further about parables, their nature and significance. Certainly, the impact of a parable is not found in a single acicular message, contra the assertions of Jülicher last century, but in what it suggests. The reader/listener has to fill in the missing referents.

Now, modern and post-modern critics have found fertile ground in this uncertainty. Much of the debate centres around the Sower parable of Mark 4:1-10, naturally enough given Jesus' statement in 4:13:

Do you not understand this parable? Then how will you understand all the parables?

For John Dominic Crossan the very point of Jesus' parables is their polyvalence, their lack of closure. He says:

Since you cannot interpret absolutely, you can interpret forever.

Yet Crossan has painted himself into a corner by dismissing Jesus' interpretation in 4:13-20 as inauthentic. It suits his reading (and his view of Jesus as a hip post-modern dude) to do so! For Crossan, the interpretation is inauthentic by definition. It also happens to disrupt the 'serenity' of Crossan's beloved polyvalence.Or should that be “the polyvalence of his beloved serenity”- 'serene' being a ubiquitous Crossanism and a yardstick of virtue: "serenly multiple image". "startling and unnerving serenity"(!), "serene plurality"? [in his book Cliffs of Fall]

The general impulse of literary critics has been to agree with Crossan as to the open-endedness of the parables, but to re-insert them in their context: the narratives of the gospels. In his agnostic, agonistic but erudite reading of Mark, The Genesis of Secrecy, Frank Kermode despairs of finding meaning at all, with the Sower parable as "the great crux" - a promise of meaning never delivered. He too finds "the authorised allegory seems inept”. This only seems enticing to a post­structuralist critic like Stephen D. Moore, who in a virtuoso performance of high deconstruction bungee-jumps gleefully over the “cliffs of fall” that so daunt Crossan and disappoint Kermode:

Parabole unsettles speech. It inhabits the oppositions of inside and outside, speech and writing, but only that it might... shake the interpretative (bed)frames so as to keep the interpreters restlessly turning over.

Ironically, it is critics such as Moore, Kermode and Crossan have taken the teasing language of the parables too one-dimensionally. Just because they don't produce meaning as ordinary texts do, does not mean they are meaningless, or endlessly polyvalent, or impossible to confine. It merely indicates that other reading strategies have to be engaged to understand their importance.

Sir Frank Kermode

Rushdie and the Shi'ites at Hawkes Bay

More on the Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie:

The tragic confusion of good and evil is intensified in the novel’s 8th chapter ‘The Parting of the Arabian Sea’. Gibreel this time dreams of an ill-fated pilgrimage of the villagers of Titlipur lead by the mystical and mysterious girl Ayesha. The events of this part of the narrative are based on a real incident which occurred in 1983: thirty-eight Shi’ites marched into Hawkes Bay in Karachi, Pakistan at the instigation of their spiritual guide who had taught them that the sea would part as in the days of the Exodus, enabling them to journey to the holy city of Kerbala, in Iraq.[1]

In The Satanic Verses, Ayesha, strangely surrounded by butterflies which are interpreted as some kind of divine sign, determines to reach Mecca by marching through the Arabian Sea. Mirza Saeed tries to persuade his very ill wife Mishal to abandon the pilgrimage; but like most of the devotees, she will not be swayed despite her declining physical condition. Even the deaths of several elderly pilgrims have little effect: they are now called ‘martyrs’ by Ayesha. Increasingly, Ayesha’s fanaticism makes her more and more tyrannical and brutal, condoning the stoning to death of an abandoned baby as ‘the Devil’s Child’ out of religious fervour. Mirza Saeed can only look on helplessly as his wife and her companions stride into the sea and are drowned: or, at least, that is what Mirza himself witnesses. Others present, more devout than he, claim that the sea did in fact miraculously open as prophesied by Ayesha.

Rushdie, with his self-consciously postmodern narrative technique, appears to relish the ambiguity: the miracle both did and did not happen, and it ‘happened’ in a dream sequence in any case. But it is not the triumphalist, miraculous and religious version of events that we the reader are inclined to believe. The tragedy is as much the willingness of the faithful to ignore the death of the naïve and the innocent. It takes religious fanaticism – the ‘eyes of faith’ – to make a sign of divine benevolence out of such willful self-destruction; and Rushdie despairs of ever convincing those who look with such eyes on the world. Those who would be, and would have, martyrs are (as far as he is concerned) beyond the pale.

[1] The tragic story is told in Akbar S. Ahmed, "Death in Islam: The Hawkes Bay Case," Man 21, no. 1 (1986)

Emrys Jones reviews a production of Murder in the Cathedral

Canterbury Cathedral: not quite as irrelevant as the last one.

Emrys Jones wrote an intriguing review essay of a production of Murder in the Cathedral at Stratford, published in 1993. In the essay he argues that (as Craig Raine explains) Eliot's play is highly dramatic - and that the drama, though helped by historical authenticity of the events staged and significantly enriched by directorial additions, is clearer because its religious appeal is now more or less defunct. Jones says 'it's a play not a theological or devotional discourse!'

I find this (naturally) a remarkable judgement, and the latter comment a false dichotomy. Removing the 'religious' component of the death of the Archbishop leaves you with what kind of death exactly? In what way is the death at all honourable or noble or admirable or representative if it is a secular martyrdom of some kind? In fact, Eliot makes sure that we cannot make precisely this move. There is no 'cause' for which he dies - he is no MLK or Gandhi, no secularised saint. In fact, Thomas resists at every turn secularising himself: that is surely the point! He does not even succomb to pride - unless you side with his murderers, who justify themselves (as he does not) by accusing him of delusions of spiritual grandeur. If the religious component is excised like that, is he not guilty of neglect of his duty, his people and his country? Is he not convicted of seditious action, or wilfully provoking the wrath of the king in order to secure his place in history? What comfort or lesson can modern audiences take from this?

Raine perceptibly ask whether the play can still work if there is this defunct core at the centre of it. Quite...

I think this is illustrative of the contemporary inability to come to terms with the martyr as anything but a pitiable and possibly dangerous figure. If the convictions that move Thomas do not convict the audience at some level, then I find it hard to know how the drama can have any purchase other than as a historical curio. That these events are historical is perhaps more significant than it at first seems: because these events are not invented as a morality tale of rather sentimental proportions, because these are representations of real people engaged in what was a well testified event locatable and date-able, then we are not afforded the luxury of dismissing them as somehow fantastical and inhuman. This is likewise true of the martyrs of the church: there they stand, as real people prepared to be unwavering in their conviction of the truth, such that we cannot deny them. Their flesh was burnt, and torn by wild animals, and pierced.

Jones also writes:

Robert Speaght has spoken as an actor of the difficulty he found at first in coming to temrs with the passivity of the protagonist.

This is something I have also noticed about the play and about Thomas, and it is quite deliberate on Eliot's part that it be so. Thomas is NOT a man of action; he is a man of passion.

Martyrdom as communicative act

Sydney's St Andrew's Cathedral.

I have been reading in MacIntyre about different, indeed rival, rationalities. In particular, he wants to show how incommensurate different rationalities are: how it is nigh impossible to understand one from the point of view of the other without translating it into terms that limit and distort it.

Now, what attracted me to martyrdom as a subject was partly the huge dissonance it revealed between two different 'rationalities' (or perhaps 'world views'): that is to say, for the secular liberal, Christian martyrdom can only be understood as a life-denying, futile and possibly violence-perpetuation act. For the Christian, we cannot really see what the secularists concern is. And, it is worth asking at this point whether martyrdom becomes the ultimate 'no' to further communication with the other point of view - 'I am ready to accept death rather than accept your terms of conversation, or to concede anything' seems to be the attitude, or it could be read as that I guess. It is a defiance of rational discussion, apparently. Is martyrdom then merely a point at which the two world-views are shown to be irreconcilable, and that's that? Is it merely a gesture of defiance against the alternate order of power?

But: martyrdom is a remarkably successful form of communication to the non-church world. We cannot forget: the martyrs of Jesus Christ overthrew a mighty empire from within! The note that Christian martyrdom strikes is dissonant to the extent that it exposes the futility of opposition to God. It testifies to the non-ultimacy of human political power - and it testifies to that power itself. Sometimes, it seems, even the rulers and the soldiers get the message. Remember the centurion 'when he saw how Jesus died' said 'surely this was the Son of God'...'The blood of the martyrs' as Tertullian said 'is the seed of the church'. Which is to say, the blood of the martyrs convinces outsiders of the need to become insiders, to say 'I'll have what he's/she's having'.

Question is: what is it about martyrdom that communicates so well? This question asks at a deeper level: what is it in martyrdom coming as it does out of a precisely Christian understanding of the world that is able to be meaningful enough in any world-view?
Is it an exhibition of remarkable courage, or endurance, or some virtue that is found nowhere else in these proportions? Or is the meaning - the story - that the martyrs and their brethren attach to their deaths?

Alasdair MacIntyre continues...

Well, I shoulda read the next chapter before posting! As MacIntyre tells it, Thomas Aquinas was uniquely able to reconcile Augustinianism and Aristotelianism in his thought. This was because he didn't imagine that he was translating one into the terms of the other - MacIntyre thinks this never works. What he was able to do was to inhabit both worlds of though in true bilingual fashion, and so produce a synthesis which was native to both.

MacIntyre doesn't give much detail as yet as to how this actually works out in Thomas' thought. How can he hold together a strong view of original sin and its noetic effects AND also have an Aristotelian rationality?

Alasdair MacIntyre on Augustinianism and its flaws

MacIntyre's analysis of the history of moral enquiry reaches charts the rise of the Augustinian tradition in the middle ages. Augustinianism, as he outlines it, on the one hand, has a strong centre: all knowledge coheres around the divine. Knowledge is only gained from giving oneself over, by an act of faith, to an authority. It is confessional. But (and it is a big but) knowing in human terms is deeply affected by sin's distorting and disrupting effects. Pure knowledge is not possible because of sin.

This might seem contradictory: it is certainly a tension in the heart of Augustinianism, and one that Calvinism (and for that matter Lutheranism) has struggled to resolve. Certainly, that is why Calvin and others give accounts of divine illumination being necessary for even basic knowledge of the world.

BUT: a huge challenge comes with the adoption of Aristotelianism into the Augustinian way of thinking, or the attempted adoption at least. Aristotelianism denies that there is a need for this fideistic first step: it has no account of the genesis of knowledge as an externally given thing. Augustinianism, after all, is Platonistic.

Can the two be reconciled? I await MacIntyre's further analysis: but in the meantime, let me just say this -

it is interesting that Aristotelianism was adapted in so wholesale a fashion by the 17th century Protestants when the roots of their movement were so markedly Augustinian. Could they really make this adaptation without betraying the true genius of Protestantism (as a particularly concentrated form of Augustinianism)?

Dairmaid MacCulloch on the Reformation

Dairmaid MacCulloch (whose name I now spell correctly!) has an interesting take on the theological/religious context into which the Reformation was addressed. Firstly, he stresses the importance, in Northern Europe in particular, of the doctrine of purgatory and prayers/masses for the dead. This was both an industry on a mass scale, and crucial to the inner spiritual self-conception of the whole culture. The whole bureaucracy and economy of the afterlife was written into the mentality of western Christianity. The Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith called into question, then, not only ideas but whole systems and institutions of worship and daily life.

Secondly, he notes the waxing power of the papacy in Western Europe, which itself was a fairly recent phenomenon. The conciliarist movement of the fifteenth century had only lately failed to challenge the papacy for supremacy in the Church.

Matheson Russell on evil and the free-will defence

The problem of evil: is the free-will defence a failure?

A lecture delivered by Dr Matheson Russell, my good friend.

Here he is on the right enjoying a red wine.

So many jailed, and the key of compassion thrown away - Opinion - smh.com.au

So many jailed, and the key of compassion thrown away


An article by PF Jensen.

The clergy family and the Reformation

Diarmid MacCullough, the doyen of Reformation historians, writes this intriguing paragraph:

The clergy wife, from being abused and despised by conservatives in the parish, came to provide a new model for all the wives of Protestant Europe: she was now without any female rival for iconic status since nuns and achoresses had been banished from Protestant society. Following the Bucerian ideal, she was of course obedient to her husband, but she was also a calm and experienced companion, ready to give advice and help to parishioners - also to sustain the cheerfulness of her spouse and her children in a publicaly enacted life which made them all potentially rather lonely objects of the curiosity and envy as well as the emulation of others. And so the parsonage or the manse, not so well-supplied with spare cash as with books, high ideals and high thinking, negotiated its way through a social position which was continually poised self-consciously and uncertainly between gentry and people. It took its place as one of the great cultural forces in Protestant societies, both in the Old World and the New. In the upheavals of the Enlightenment and after, it produced some of the most eloquent and troubled voices to face up to doubt and unflinching reassesment of the family business: Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzche and Karl Barth were all the sons of pastors... p. 653-54

MacCullough can speak so acutely here because he, too, was a child of the vicarage! It has always been my contention that we clergy children have punched above our weight, for good or for ill. Here are some others:

Alice Cooper (rock musician)
Bob Hawke (Australian Prime Minister)
The Bronte Sisters (novelists)
Manning Clark (Australian myth-maker)

Not quite of the rank of the three already mentioned: can we suggest some others?

Raine, Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

Raine comments on Murder in the Cathedral:

Eliot's coinage, 'Unreal city', [in The Waste Land] owes a great deal to Buddhist ideas of maya or illusion. Later it is assimilated to the Christian idea of this fleeting world. In Murder in the Cathedral, the chorus refers to Hebrews 13:14: 'for here we have no continuining city, but we seek one to come.' Or, in Eliot's play: 'Here is no continuing city, here is no abiding stay'. Religions have a way of slighting the temporal. p. 82

Is this what really happens in the play, and in Christian thought too? Is the temporal 'slighted'? The pressing urgency of the present is certainly reduced by Christian eschatology. But, on the other hand, you could easily argue that the temporal is given renewed significance: as Paul says, in light of the resurrection 'your labour in the Lord is not in vain'.

A new campus for Moore College?

The view is certainly spectacular, and the monks wouldn't get in the way too much...

Craig Raine, TS Eliot and Renunciation

Craig Raine of New College, Oxford, argues in his new book TS Eliot - Image, Text and Context that one of the central themes of Eliot's poetry is what might be termed 'the failure to live'. Which is to say, many of his poems speak of, or in the voice of, characters who, through fear, are unable to fulfill their own buried longings. They fail to live through failure to seize hold of either evil or good (even). They just refrain.

A significant shift occurs with Eliot's conversion, however: he begins to see that renunciation might not indicate a failure to live, but rather quite the opposite. Here is Raine:

The romantic Eliot regretted the buried feelings left unfulfilled and rued the cautious circumspection of our sluggish hearts. The ascetic Eliot, though, could see the virtue of renunciation - and its difficulty. He writes, therefore, about the failure of feeling in poems like 'Gerontion' 'Animula' and The Hollow Men. At the same time, in Ash-Wednesday, he shows us the worthy obverse of this position - the ascetic renunciation which chooses to turn its back on pleasure, on the temporal, on sensuous emotion, on the self itself, the better to embrace eternal verities. And finds that his will to renounce the temporary illusion of the temporarl is weaker than his helpless passion for the natural world.... p. 40

This feeds directly into Eliot's thinking about martyrdom, which might well be termed a 'failure to live'. But the problem comes with the will, doesn't it? Who can really honestly will his own martyrdom over against the natural world? Who is strong enough to renounce it on his own? Eliot himself later recognises that renunciation is not a triumph of the human will, but rather a free submission to the will of God...

(One of the other great virtues of Raine's book is a defence of Eliot from the charges of anti-semitism.)

The martyred body

The martyr with a visceral clarity allows his or her body to be open to God’s signification rather than keep it as a site of the assertion of the meaning one wants to ascribe to oneself. Christ’s resurrection body is given as a promise of that divine signification.

Ricoeur on the exegesis of Gen 1

Photo: Dunblane Cathedral, Scotland.

Ricoeur's essay on exegesis relies the planting of two poles of interpretation which he says are indispensible. First, there is the genetic approach of von Rad et al. Second, there is the structural approach of Schmidt. Ricoeur says that in the case of Gen 1 the structural approach actually draws attention to the genesis of the text: by observing irregularities within the structure the way in which previous texts have been incorporated into the work becomes evident. Interpretation then is the 'act of the text itself on itself'. Already in the text interpretation has begun. The notion of interpretation, says Ricoeur, is 'an act of the text insofar as the text has a direction, a dynamic 'sense'. To interpret is to place ourselves in 'its sense'. I find this emphasis on the text as opposed to the author or the reader extremely interesting, because it draws the exegetes attention to the right place.

All well and good: only his account of the genetic method (of discerning layers of sources and editing in the text - the bread and butter of biblical criticism for years) rests on speculation after speculation after speculation. Certainly, if we could say with confidence that such-and-such a formula represents such-and-such a tradition which the later author/editor has both critiqued and incorporated into this new text, then we may find ourselves enlightened. The basic fact is that there is no agreement amongst scholars as to the arrangement of the source material and the composition of the text. So how much use is it really?

Bach as theologian

David Bentley Hart writes:

Bach is the greatest of Christian theologians, the most inspired witness to the ordo amoris in the fabric of being; not only is no other composer capable of more freely developing lines or of more elaborate structures of tonal mediation (wheresoever the line goes, Bach is there also), but no one as compellingly demonstrates that the infinite is beauty and that beauty is infinite. It is in Bach's music, as nowhere else, that the potential boundlessness of thematic development becomes manifest: how a them can unfold inexorably through difference, while remaining continuous in each moment of repetition, upon a potentially infinite surface of varied repetition. p. 282-3

Choosing Bach of course presents Hart with fewer difficulties than Barth's choosing of Mozart: Barth had to admit that Mozart was not a good man, and probably not a very firm believer. So, he had to seperate the music from the man. Here, no such problem: the composer could not, would not have composed as he did apart from the knowledge of God that he clearly had.

I find it interesting that Hart the Eastern Orthodox exults Bach the Protestant when Hart is so anti-Protestant in general. And yet there is a Protestant plainness to Bach, even when he is writing music for Masses. This aesthetic, far from being evidence of a dour disposition, is I think one of Protestantisms great strength: it is in better taste than the alternatives within Christianity (think the saccharine ornateness of much Catholic and Orthodox art...). At least, that is a Hartian argument!

An Afternoon at the Cricket in England - a photo essay

1. The Worcester College ground is found by walking around the lake... ...over the bridge...
   ...under the trees...
   ...and there you are: an English cricket ground guarded appropriately by...four DUCKS.
   After five overs, our team was 2-34, and the rain started...
   ...early tea was taken, but it the end to no avail and play was abandoned for the afternoon.
   Better luck next week I suppose!
   

Rowan Williams linking judgment and parables again

Salisbury Cathedral cloister.

Mike Higton generously alerted me to this comment by Rowan Williams in an essay from the collection to be published very soon. It seems to me that Williams is always trying think about how we can talk about God and what we might say when we are doing it:

If Jesus is constitutive for Christian language about God and for the present reality of the believer’s relation to God, in such a way that what is said, done, and suffered is strictly unintelligible without continuing reference to Jesus in a more than historically explicatory way, doctrine will be an attempt to do justice to the way in which the narrative and the continuing presence (or presence-in-absence, if you want to nuance it further) of Jesus is held actively to shape present horizons, in judgement and in grace. The disagreement is not over whether doctrinal utterances are or are not to be received uncritically, but over whether any kind of critical method can settle the legitimacy of the distinctively doctrinal enterprise itself as generally conceived by Christians, an enterprise resting as it does on the conviction, variously and often very confusedly articulated in our primary texts, that our world of speech and corporate life has been comprehensively remade, so that new conceptualities are brought to birth. Kritik can look hard at those conceptualities, with a wide variety of suspicions; but not all Wiles’s reasoned eloquence should persuade us that it is in a position to disallow the underlying unsettlement of our thought: the question, ‘What is it that is true of Jesus of Nazareth that would make some sense of the Church’s commitment to new imaginings of God and humanity and of the possibility of new relation to God and humanity?’ I believe that this is in fact the question that arises from taking with full seriousness the notion of parable which Wiles finds so attractive – an event which interrupts us and compels us to take up new positions by showing us quite unexpectedly where and what we are in respect of an unforeseen reality set down before us; something more than an extended simile. Wiles is far from insensitive to this priority of krisis over Kritik; but how can his model of doctrinal criticism allow it its proper weight?

This thought appears again and again: the narrative of Jesus AND his continuing presence (Holy Spirit? Church?) shape and reshape our 'present horizons', by judgement - bringing them to a point of krisis - and grace. Our primary texts (scripture, in other words) are very confusing, and so the task of criticism is required: but this critical task (Kritik) ought to be secondary to the more self- and world-critical task of answering to the confrontation and interruption that we find in the teaching of Jesus and the gospel itself. That's Williams' problem with Maurice Wiles, who represents the old school liberal (and most certainly not orthodox) kind of scholarship that Williams defines himself against. How can Wiles have his critical cake and eat it too? Williams is unconvinced.

However, Williams sees the parables of Jesus as giving impetus and licence to 'new imaginings' about God and God-and-us. In this way, he is 'progressivist': he might well share Peter Carnley's self-description as 'Progressive Orthodox'. Williams is committed to the expectation that there will be new things to say about God, new encounters with him, new languages about him generated.

Thomas Weinandy asks 'Does God Suffer?'

Just dipping into Weinandy's book Does God Suffer? I am finding a penetrating and illuminating discussion of the 'problem' of the impassability of God. I noted this comment, on evangelism and the 'suffering God':

...it should be noted that inherent within a theology of a suffering God is a feeble theology of evangelization. Those who propose that God suffers in himself speak as if this gives consolation to those who suffer. This has been shown to be a deceptive consolation. Moreover, they speak as if everyone, regardless of whether one is a Christian or not, is equally consoled by a suffering God. Thus, there is no urgent need to preach the gospel. But this too is false to the gospel. The Father does wish to console everyone, and that is precisely why he sent his Son into the world. However, the Father can only fully console those who are in union with Christ for Christ is the Father's consolation. It is only in Christ Jesus that one can come to experience fully the riches of the Father's mercy.... p. 249

It is a telling critique if he is right.

Of course, martyrdom is inevitably part of a discussion of whether God suffers, even if briefly:

While one should not seek martyrdom, yet to suffer for the sake of the gospel and even to die for the name of Jesus is a Christian's supreme honour. It is the Christian's consummate boast. p. 280

[Weinandy also reminded me that John Paul II once said this cool thing:

Martyrdom, accepted as an affirmation of the inviolabilty of the moral order, bears splendid witness both to the holiness of God's law and to the inviolability of the personal dignity of man, created in God's image and likeness.]